


my knives and my heart up my sleeves

by Yellow



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, background terrifying god bullshit, dubious attempt at how these two first hooked up, wolf nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 16:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11467638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yellow/pseuds/Yellow
Summary: the first time samot ever scolded samothes + the first time samothes saw samot as an equal.





	my knives and my heart up my sleeves

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for the prompt linda! it...grew beyond the prompt, but like, Still Written All in One Go. lmao. hope u like it <3
> 
> title from "empire," by jukebox the ghost.

“Samothes,” Samot said, warningly, and Samothes looked up from the forge to see Samot storming towards him. He put down his hammer just in time to catch Samot's hand as it came for his face.

“What is the matter?” Samothes asked, pleasant.

“The forest is gone,” Samot said. Samothes had seen him angry in jest, the pout he wore so prettily. But Samot was angry, today. Samothes couldn't remember if he had ever seen him truly enraged.

With reconfiguration, Samothes couldn't tell what was first and what was second. Samot had become a master of the pen, and his rewrites were graceful in a way Samothes's never were, little flicks of the pen changing the type of flowers on a balcony. But seeing Samot's face, red with indignation, was new, and exciting. Cute, too.

He had been growing more graceful, little changes to his character over hundreds of years, and Samothes thanked their father he hadn't yet figured out how to stop himself from growing flustered.

Samothes smiled, and Samot growled, pulling his hand free.

“The wolves,” he hissed. “The wolves have nowhere to go. Find another source of wood.”

Samothes's smile dropped.

“My people-”

“Are your domain, and so I do not touch them.” Samot's eyes glowed. He seemed to grow older with every word. The Boy-King had matured when Samothes was not looking, it seemed.

He was once a pupil, a mentee. Now he seemed a god.

Samothes leaned back and considered him.

“And you suggest I am encroaching on your domain.”

“I am giving you warning,” Samot said. “Severia will flood your forge and cool the volcano to ash and rock.”

Samothes hummed.

“But she has not yet come,” he said. “And my people need wood, for their homes and fires.”

He leaned back against his forge and smiled, sharp as the sting of sparks on his chest as he hammered out a new divine gift.

“Can you stop me, Boy-King?”

Samot stood to his full height.

“Regardless, it will be the last you see of me,” he said.

“So be it,” Samothes said, and returned to his forge.

 

Samothes waited.

He was not so sure the Boy-King was a boy anymore. He wanted to see what that meant.

The forest came down, tree by tree, and every night he heard howling in the distance. But the floods never came, the wolves never came, and Samot, true to his word, never came.

 

Little things went wrong. A broken leg here, a river flooding there, children wandering too far into the woods. Samothes's handcrafted hammer cracking, even, down the middle. Not war, but annoyances, too deliberate to be anyone else's work.

The thing that ate at Samothes the most, though, was Samot himself.

He had grown used to their dance, the friendship, the flirtation, the work it took to stay a step ahead of him. Samot came to the volcano more nights than not, and Samothes would find him tucked into a chair reading as if he lived there. He missed the feeling of Samot's hair on his hand, the way Samot would lean back into his touch and smile up at him. The quiet of it all. The peace.

Samothes loved nothing more than the heartbeat of hammer on anvil, but the forge's warmth could not quite substitute for Samot's hand in his, leading him in a new folk dance.

 

Samothes was not much of a writer, or much of a musician, but he made the metal sing, that night, rewriting his mistakes with every stroke.

 

The next day, (though what were days in the face of reconfiguration), Samothes left the volcano, walked barefoot to the woods, and sat, cross legged. Waited.

He sat for hours and watched the moons rise.

When they crossed in the sky a white wolf appeared and padded over to him. It did not bow. It stared him in the eyes and then laid down in his lap.

Samothes felt overcome with relief in a way that startled him. His hand played absentmindedly in the fur at the scruff of the wolf's neck.

And then his lap was full of naked man, and Samot lay his head on Samothes's thigh.

“You moved the whole village,” he said, stretching into Samothes's hand, and smiled.

Samothes smiled back, despite himself.

“They'll be able to find materials there without disturbing your wolves.”

“What changed your mind?” Samot asked, a glint in his eyes. His circlet sat pretty on his head, even lying down, just a few shades darker than his golden hair. Samothes had made it for him, when he'd gotten the name the Boy-King. Samothes hadn't seen Samot without it since.

“You,” Samothes said.

And something was right in the way that it wasn't, for hundreds of years before, something about the tiny changes Samot had wrought in himself, in the flowers on all the balconies in town, something in Samothes's mechanical wonders. Somehow they come to this night where the air was cooling and the moons lit the forest, and there Samot smiled and sat up and kissed Samothes the way he had wanted to since they met.

Samothes leaned into the kiss and followed Samot's lips when he drew back.

“I,” Samothes said, trying to find words. Samot twisted in his lap and threw back his head and laughed.

“If I had known how you blushed I'd have done this long ago,” he said.

Samothes felt his cheeks warm more, and Samot kissed them both in turn.

“What-what do you want?” Samothes said.

Samot looked him in the eye.

“To be treated as your equal, as a god,” he said, and Samothes swallowed. “And to go someplace warmer.”

Samothes's mouth ticked up at the corner.

“Would you like that?” Samot asked, looking up at him through his eyelashes.

“Very much so,” Samothes managed, and then the man was a wolf again, running for the volcano.

Samothes yelled and laughed and chased Samot to his home, thinking of the years behind them and the many, many years ahead.

**Author's Note:**

> god bullshit is weird, huh? hmu @erintherockerin


End file.
